Introduction
IV. Same-sex in the public sphere
policies; they said they shouldn’t say this or shouldn’t say that.…” So it’s about fear. And they are the people making the work difficult for me.39 Beyond being a proselytising issue, churchly anti-homosexuality rhetoric also has a political dimension. Ezra Chitando and Adriaan van Klinken suggest that churchly active engagement in the politicisation of homosexuality is connected to the reality of the aggressive competition in the “religious market” among Christians, and in Nigeria and elsewhere, between Muslims and Christians.40 In Ghana, the timing of churchly anti- homosexual public statements, as noted, is considerable. Gifford has noted that by the beginning of the Fourth Republic, the two most significant religious bodies in Ghana noted for their vociferous public statements were the Ghana Catholic Bishops Conference and the Christian Council of Ghana.41 The fact that public anti-homosexual narratives coincided with the active pentecostal engagement in the public sphere, provides crucial perspectives into appreciating the role Christianity – particularly pentecostalism – plays in the politics of homosexuality in the public domain.
external forces. As such, it invokes religious and customary ideals to reject external demands to legalise same-sex.
In the face of the state of Ghana’s inadequacy in meeting certain international human rights standards, religious and customary systems and authorities are deployed to resist external pressure. As a secular state
“inextricably bound up with religion and the spirit world,”42 the state of Ghana largely depends on religion-based normative systems and authorities to resist external influences regarding homosexuality. Political actors insist that demands to conform to universal sexual morality would systematically weaken Ghana’s cultural and social peculiarity. On March 2014, for example, Professor Mike Oquaye, the current Speaker of Parliament, lamented what he deemed a clear attempt by Western liberal states, in collaboration with the World Bank, in “ganging up in a collective action against Africa.”43 The political historian noted that international intimidation resulting from legalisation of same-sex was very serious and urged African nations to come out with a united front so that societal ideas, beliefs, values, and practices “which form the cornerstone of our acculturisation should not be undermined.”44 Clearly the professor and political actor was not invoking Ghana’s secular legal norms which cannot stand the influences of legal universalism. As a result, he appealed to the religious and cultural values of Ghana which have much purchase at the local and national level.
Homosexual practice has in the last couple of years become a political arena of ideological contests between liberal and non-liberal nation-states.
International aid to end poverty and other social challenges in Africa has been tied to the receiving country’s adherence to basic political and human rights standards. During February 2014, for example, the World Bank announced the suspension of $90 million in loans aimed at improving the Ugandan health sector following the passage of the country’s 2014 Anti- Homosexual Act. Countries such as Denmark, the Netherlands, and Norway also followed suit to freeze all aid to the Ugandan government.45 This morally controversial decision was preceded by similar demands in November 2011 at the Commonwealth Heads of Government Meeting in
42 John S. Pobee, “Religion and Politics in Ghana: A Case Study of the Acheampong Era 1972-1978” (An Inter-Faculty Lecture on Thursday 10 January 1980, Accra: Ghana Universities Press, 1992), 1.
43 Mike Oquaye, “Homosexuality and Lesbianism: A Global Threat to Africa,” News Ghana, 23 March 2014, http://newsghana.com.gh/homosexuality-lesbianism-global-threat-africa/
44 Mike Oquaye, “Homosexuality and Lesbianism: A Global Threat to Africa.”
45 Mike Pflanz, “Keep Your Gays and Keep Your Aid, Uganda Tells the West,” The Telegraph, 28 February 2014.
Perth, Australia. During this meeting, then British Prime Minister, David Cameron, announced that Britain was considering cutting aid to countries which failed to respect gay rights.
While external conditionalities such as the above have since the 1990s led to several economic and political reforms including ongoing democratisation of the continent, there have also been some residual effects in terms of religious and customary tensions. The demand for the adherence to liberal ideals such as the legalisation of same-sex marriages, problematises the dominant struggles between the West and post-colonised states such as Ghana. The refusal on the part of some African states to yield to this external demand has led to mischaracterisations such as homophobic Africa.46 However, more important for this discussion is how local values regarding sexuality become directly involved with universal legal contests. Not only is the subjugation of the human body and sexuality a tool for maintaining state power in the Foucauldian sense, but through the politics of homosexuality, the state’s normative legitimacy can and does become a stage for political manipulation.
A major concern regarding this demand was that once the legalisation of same-sex partnerships are tied to certain requirements especially before securing external help, then it creates a dependency-syndrome between the rich, liberal, donor countries, and the needy, non-liberal, recipient nations. As Professor Oquaye laments, conditions set by donor states are said to undermine local ideals which are held as core identifiers of the states’ uniqueness.
To the extent that liberalism evolved within particular enabling historical and political contexts,47 conditions set by liberal states and organisations in connection with same-sex partnerships raise further tensions between local values and national and international human rights norms. In strong liberal societies, individual actors have the power and the means of challenging the state. Individual agency works in an entirely different context in traditional societies. In Ghana and most of Africa, because of the widespread religious and customary influences, the government acting on behalf of the society and its people has its own exceptional challenges.
State agents very often refer to social norms and values, which are references to traditional and religious values. Although such a simple deferral to religion is a result of the absence of a distinctive state position
46 Patrick Awondo, Peter Geschiere and Graeme Reid, “Homophobic Africa? Toward a More Nuanced View,” African Studies Review 35, no. 3 (December 2012): 145-68.
47 Nikolas Rose, Powers of Freedom: Reframing Political Thought (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 139.
on same-sex marriage, the claim that religion functions as the foundational basis for certain legal and human rights actions and discourses in Ghana cannot be dismissed. Traditional and religious values influence individual actions and public debates and decisions in matters of national and universal significance.
In view of this, political actors have persistently invoked this reality to make a unique case against legalising homosexuality. For example, during July 2015 when the US President, Barack Obama, visited Kenya, he cautioned African political and religious leaders on the need to safeguard sexual minorities. In response, the Kenyan President, Uhuru Kenyatta, reminded President Obama that it is very difficult to impose on people that which they themselves do not accept. In Kenya, like most of Africa, he said, “gay rights is really a non-issue,”48 thus, giving credence to the earlier position that homosexuality was originally not an issue of public concern. He posited that unlike advanced countries like the US, Kenya’s immediate day-to-day needs were health issues, infrastructure, roads, women empowerment, and education. The Kenyan President emphasised that
“maybe once, like you [the US], [we] have overcome some of these challenges, we can begin to look at other ones, but as of now the fact remains that this issue is not really an issue that is at the foremost minds of Kenyans and that is a fact.”49 While President Kenyatta couched his rejection of President Obama’s demand in a crafty secular argument, beneath it lies religious and cultural ideals of a sovereign Kenyan state, which as he said, is different from those of liberal countries like the US.
Confronted with this reality, many African governments very often invoke religious and customary polemics in asserting political sovereignty. An imminent threat of societal destruction due to homosexuality, thus, becomes a potent political and moral power through which the state’s
“exclusive control culture”50 is maintained. However, at the same time, if indeed the state’s legal authority and national sovereignty depend on its ability to control its populations and institutions,51 then anxieties over the eminent destruction of the societal foundation as a result of homosexuality
48 Kiran Moodley, “Kenya President Uhuru Kenyatta Clashes with President Obama on LGBT Equality: ‘Gay Rights Is Really a Non-issue,’” Independent, 27 July 2015, http://www.independent.co.uk/news/people/kenya-president-uhuru-kenyatta-clashes-with- president-obama-on-lgbt-equality-gay-rights-is-really-a-10418267.html
49 Kiran Moodley, “Kenya President Uhuru Kenyatta Clashes.
50 Stanley Cohen, Folk Devils and Moral Panic: The Creation of Mods and Rockers (London and New York: Routledge, 2002), 66.
51 Jean L. Cohen, Globalization and Sovereignty: Rethinking Legality, Legitimacy, and Constitutionalism (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2012), 68.
becomes a technique of maintaining state sovereignty, even if only by implication. For example, subsequent to the demand made by David Cameron cited above, the then President of Ghana, Professor John Evans Atta Mills, rejected this condition by explicitly invoking national sovereignty, cultural values, and societal norms. The law professor argued that David Cameron, like any other political leader, was entitled to opinions that reflected the norms and ideals of his society. Yet, he argued, neither Cameron nor any other leader had
the right to direct other sovereign nations as to what they should do especially where their societal norms and ideals are different from those which exist in Prime Minister Cameron’s society. I, as president of this nation, will never initiate or support any attempt to legalise homosexuality in Ghana. As a government, we will abide by the principles enshrined in our Constitution, which Constitution is supreme.52
This coheres with my claim that religious convictions and customary values and ideals furnish the nation-state with the solidarity its needs to assert its full sovereignty. The state of Ghana, as elsewhere, no longer has absolute authority and exclusive jurisdiction over its borders, its laws and its population. As a state party to many of international protocols and treaties, its control over matters of policies, sovereignty, legal authority, and influence is not absolute, but fragmented. Abuses of power and violations of human rights are not merely breaches peculiar to a state. As a state party, international communities can at any point in time call it to account for such abuses. State parties’ human rights records and commitments are also readily available to outsiders and are constantly monitored by special rapporteurs who are representatives of international organisations. With this in mind, Ghana’s claim to territorial sovereignty alone is not enough to insulate it from issues of gay rights. Due to high societal opposition to the practice, it is understandable why President Mills would link Ghana’s sovereignty with the sanctity society attaches to sexuality as extra basis for his insistence on Ghana’s position on same- sex relationship. It is also clear why many Ghanaians accused President Akuffo Addo for missing the opportunity to unequivocally state his unwillingness to initiate moves for the legalisation of homosexuality in Ghana.
While Ghana’s constitution and other statutory laws protect individual freedom including sexual rights, we also see how religious-customary values play an important role in deciding which rights are to be guaranteed
52 “Ghana Will Not Legalise Homosexuality,” Youtube.com, 4 November 2011, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=px0XQwmiQ68
and which ones are to be repressed for the survival of the nation-state.
We get an affirmation that while contemporary Ghana is constitutionally secular, because of the saturated nature of religion and custom, at any point in time it holds fit, it can curtail individual rights under domestic and international human rights if it feels these systems are threatened.
State agents’ conception of partners of same-sex relationships as sexual deviants is akin to those held by traditional and church leaders. They perceive the homosexual practice as constituting a menace to social norms and traditional values. While such dangers are decidedly imagined or exaggerated, they nonetheless become bases for limiting certain individual autonomy. Homosexuals are blamed for economic and other failures of the country.53 As the Millian harm principle proposes, the only justifiable basis for which intervention is needed is to prevent harm to others.54 We see a similar argument made by President Mills, namely that Ghana as a sovereign nation-state will not accept any aid if that will eventually destroy (harm) the very society that the aid is meant to improve.55 Just like the chiefly and church actors, the state couches homosexuality as harming the moral community. Intriguingly, while it is still not clear what the nature of harm or “destruction” homosexuals bring to society, the fear of this “harm” has been used to resist external pressure and influence in connection with homosexual rights, raising further challenges for the enforcement of national laws and the development and human rights in Ghana.
Conclusion
This paper has furthered an understanding of the way in which religion publicly engages law and politics in Ghana. It has illustrated the idea that when Ghanaians, including high profile political actors, resist the legalisation of homosexual relationship, they are in principle signalling that, despite the constitutional guarantee of sexual freedom, the rights of homosexuals must be respected within the context of religious and customary definitions society has given to marriage and sexuality. I have contended that the ongoing tensions over homosexuality are a part of a systematic means through which society has used sexuality to maintain power and order. Throughout its encounter with foreign normative
53 “NDC Guru Blames Economic Woes on Pro-gay Saboteurs,” Ghanaweb.com, 3 July 2014, http://www.ghanaweb.com/GhanaHomePage/NewsArchive/NDC-Guru-blames-economic- woes-on-pro-gay-saboteurs-315360
54 John Stuart Mill, On Liberty (Ontario: Batoche Books, 2001), 13.
55 “Ghana Will Not Legalise Homosexuality.”
systems and even before that, sexuality was used as an important marker of regulating society and also maintaining chiefly power. In the new society, traditional authorities who wish to maintain the remaining authority, have insisted on the application of their ancestral norm on sexuality as a means of demanding allegiance to chiefly office.
The second unique contribution of this paper is that I have shown that in the politics of homosexuality, we see a very fluid and dynamic relationship between traditional and church actors. By characterising homosexuality as un-Ghanaian, a “filth,” and a danger to local values, there is no doubt that the values in question are those of traditional customary and familial ideals. The churches in Ghana have used the preservation of this ideal as a basis to sever practical and ideological contact with their partners in the global North.
Besides, because state power is inadequate to confront universal human rights and other legal standards, the state relies on religious values and authorities to assert its imposed sovereignty. In analysing recent homosexual controversy, I have demonstrated that in a plural legal society such as Ghana, homosexuality has become a fertile zone for ideological and practical contestations between domestic and universal political power and influence. Despite the normative differences, all the three traditions construct anti-homosexuality as a collective cultural value.
Doing so requires a political use of past narratives in an attempt to construct what society holds as a better future.
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